J.R. Ward: Lover Reborn

All ego. No brains.

He was going to jump. The fucker was going to jump.

Fidiot. Even though the Omega’s joy juice gave the slayers all that power, it didn’t mean the laws of physics went out the window for them. Einstein’s little ditty about energy equaling mass times acceleration was still going to apply—so when the dipshit hit the water, he was going to get blown apart, sustaining substantial structural damage. Which wouldn’t kill him but would incapacitate the hell out of him.

Fuckers couldn’t die unless they got stabbed. And they could spend eternity in a purgatory of decomposition.

Boo-frickin’-hoo.

And before his Wellsie’s murder, Tohr probably would have let it go. On the sliding scale of the war, it was more important to wrap those humans up in an amnesiac bullshit blanket and head over to help John Matthew and Qhuinn, who were still handling business back in that alley. Now? There was no pulling out: One way or the other, he and this slayer were going to do a meet-and-greet.

Tohr leaped over the guardrail, hit the walkway, and bounced up onto the fence. Locking a clawhold into the links, he swung his lower body over the top, and landed his shitkickers on the parapet.

The lesser ’s beery bravado fizzled a little as he started backing away.

“What, you think I’m afraid of heights?” Tohr said in a low voice. “Or that five feet of chainlink is going to keep me from you?”

The wind howled against them, plastering their clothes to their bodies and whistling through the steel girders. Far, far, far down below, the inky waters of the river were nothing but a vague, dark stretch, like a parking lot.

Gonna feel like asphalt, too.

“I got a gun,” the lesser yelled.

“So take it out.”

“My friends are coming for me!”

“You don’t have any friends.”

The lesser was a new recruit, his hair and eyes and skin having yet to pale out. Lanky and twitchy, he was likely a drug user who suffered from brain-fry—which was no doubt why he’d fallen for the pitch to join the Society.

“I’ll jump! I’ll fucking jump!”

Tohr palmed the handle of one of his two daggers and withdrew the black blade from his chest holster. “So quit yakking and start flying.”

The slayer looked over the edge. “I’ll do it! I swear I’ll do it!”

A gust gave them a blast from a different direction, sweeping Tohr’s long leather coat out over the free fall. “Don’t matter to me. I’ll kill you up here or down there.”

The lesser peered over the edge again, hesitated, and then let ’er rip, leaping to the side and hitting all that nothing-but-air, his arms pinwheeling as if he were trying to keep his balance so he landed feetfirst.

Which at this height would probably just drive his thighbones up into his abdominal cavity. Better than swallowing his own head, however.

Tohr resheathed his dagger and prepared for his own descent, taking a deep breath. And then it was…

As he went over the edge and took that first gasp of antigravity, the irony of the bridge jump wasn’t lost. He’d spent so much time wishing for his death to come, praying for the Scribe Virgin to take his body and send him up to be with his loved ones. Suicide had never been an option; you took your own life, you couldn’t get into the Fade—and that was the only reason he hadn’t cut his wrists, sucked on the business end of a shotgun, or… jumped off a bridge.

In his descent, he let himself enjoy the idea that this was it, that the impact coming in a second and a half was going to be the end of his suffering. All he had to do was reposition his trajectory so he was in a dive, then not protect his head and let the inevitable happen: blackout, likely paralysis, death by drowning.

Except that kind of goner-for-good couldn’t be his end result. Whoever made the call on these things would have to know that, unlike the lesser , he had an out.

Calming his mind, he dematerialized himself from the free fall—one moment gravity had a death grip on him; the next he was nothing but an invisible cloud of molecules that he could will in any direction he wanted.

Next door, the slayer hit the water not with the splash! of someone going off the side of a pool, or the ker-chunk of somebody working a diving board. The fucker was like a missile hitting a target, and the explosion registered in the form of a sonic cracking as gallons of displaced Hudson River shot up into the brisk air.

Tohr, on the other hand, chose to re-form himself on top of the massive concrete support to the right of the impact site. Three… two… one…

Bingo.

A head popped up downstream of the still-bubbling entrance point. No arms moving in an attempt to regain access to oxygen. No legs kicking. No gasping.

But it wasn’t dead: You could run them over with your car, beat them until your own fist broke, rip their arms and/or legs off, do whatever the hell you wanted… and they would still be alive.

Fuckers were the ticks of the underworld. And there was no way he wasn’t getting wet.

Tohr shrugged off his trench coat, folded it carefully, and left it nestled in the juncture where the upper part of the support met its broad, aquatic base. Getting in the drink with that on his back was a drowning recipe; plus he had to protect his forties and his cell phone.

With a couple of bounding leaps, so he could get enough momentum to put him over open water, he threw himself into dive formation, his arms pointed above his head, his palms together, his body straight as an arrow. Unlike the lesser , his penetration was elegant and smooth, even though he came at the surface of the Hudson from a good twelve- to fifteen-foot drop.

Cold. Really frickin’ cold.

After all, it was late April in upstate New York—which was still a good month away from anything remotely balmy.

Exhaling through his mouth as he stroked up from the depths, he fell into a powerful freestyle. When he got to the slayer, he locked a grip onto the jacket and began pulling the undead weight to shore.

Where he would finish this. So he could go look for the next one.

As Tohr went off the side of the bridge, John Matthew’s own life flashed before his eyes—sure as if he were the one whose shitkickers had left solid ground in favor of nothing-but-net.

He was on the shore, under the exit ramp, when it happened, in the process of finishing off the slayer he’d been chasing: From out of the corner of his eye, he saw something go into a fall from the great height above the river.

It hadn’t made sense at first. Any lesser with half a brain would know that wasn’t a good escape route. Except then everything had become too clear. A figure was standing on the lip of the bridge, leather coat billowing around like a shroud.

Tohrment.

Noooooooo , John had shouted while making no sound at all.

“Mother fucker , he’s going to jump,” Qhuinn spat from behind him.

John lunged forward, for all the good that would do, and then screamed mutely as the closest thing he had to a father jumped.

Later, John would reflect that moments like this had to be what people said of death itself—as you one-plus-oned the series of events that were unfolding, and the math added up to certain destruction, your mind flipped into slide-show mode, showing you clips of life as you had always known it:

John sitting at Tohr and Wellsie’s table that first night after he’d been adopted into the vampire world… The expression on Tohr’s face as the blood results had announced that John was Darius’s son… That nightmarish moment when the Brotherhood had arrived to tell them both that Wellsie was gone…